git-show(1) Manual Page

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

For commits it shows the log message and textual diff. It also
presents the merge commit in a special format as produced by
git-diff-tree --cc.

For tags, it shows the tag message and the referenced objects.

For trees, it shows the names (equivalent to git-ls-tree
with --name-only).

For plain blobs, it shows the plain contents.

The command takes options applicable to the git-diff-tree command to
control how the changes the commit introduces are shown.

This manual page describes only the most frequently used options.

OPTIONS

<object>…

The names of objects to show.
For a more complete list of ways to spell object names, see
"SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in git-rev-parse(1).

--pretty[=<format>]

--format[=<format>]

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format,
where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium,
full, fuller, email, raw and format:<string>.
When omitted, the format defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository
configuration (see git-config(1)).

--abbrev-commit

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object
name, show only a partial prefix. Non default number of
digits can be specified with "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies
diff output, if it is displayed).

This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for
people using 80-column terminals.

--oneline

This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit"
used together.

--encoding[=<encoding>]

The commit objects record the encoding used for the log message
in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the
command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding
preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this
defaults to UTF-8.

PRETTY FORMATS

If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format
is not oneline, email or raw, an additional line is
inserted before the Author: line. This line begins with
"Merge: " and the sha1s of ancestral commits are printed,
separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may not
necessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if you
have limited your view of history: for example, if you are
only interested in changes related to a certain directory or
file.

The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as
stored in the commit object. Notably, the SHA1s are
displayed in full, regardless of whether --abbrev or
--no-abbrev are used, and parents information show the
true parent commits, without taking grafts nor history
simplification into account.

format:

The format: format allows you to specify which information
you want to show. It works a little bit like printf format,
with the notable exception that you get a newline with %n
instead of \n.

E.g, format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was >>%s<<%n"
would show something like this:

The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago
The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<

%C(…): color specification, as described in color.branch.* config option

%m: left, right or boundary mark

%n: newline

%x00: print a byte from a hex code

%w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]]): switch line wrapping, like the -w option of
git-shortlog(1).

Note

Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the
revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog options will
insert an empty string unless we are traversing reflog entries (e.g., by
git log -g). The %d placeholder will use the "short" decoration
format if --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

If you add a {plus} (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed
is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the
placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, line-feeds that
immediately precede the expansion are deleted if and only if the
placeholder expands to an empty string.

tformat:

The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that it
provides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator" semantics. In
other words, each commit has the message terminator character (usually a
newline) appended, rather than a separator placed between entries.
This means that the final entry of a single-line format will be properly
terminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format does.
For example:

EXAMPLES

Shows the contents of the file Documentation/README as
they were current in the 10th last commit of the branch
next.

git show master:Makefile master:t/Makefile

Concatenates the contents of said Makefiles in the head
of the branch master.

Discussion

At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic.

The pathnames recorded in the index and in the tree objects
are treated as uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes.
What readdir(2) returns are what are recorded and compared
with the data git keeps track of, which in turn are expected
to be what lstat(2) and creat(2) accepts. There is no such
thing as pathname encoding translation.

The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences
of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core
level.

The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL
bytes.

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded
in UTF-8, both the core and git Porcelain are designed not to
force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular
project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, git
does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in
mind.

git-commit and git-commit-tree issues
a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look
like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your
project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to
have i18n.commitencoding in .git/config file, like this:

[i18n]
commitencoding = ISO-8859-1

Commit objects created with the above setting record the value
of i18n.commitencoding in its encoding header. This is to
help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header
implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

git-log, git-show, git-blame and friends look at the
encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the
log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can
specify the desired output encoding with
i18n.logoutputencoding in .git/config file, like this:

[i18n]
logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1

If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of
i18n.commitencoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log
message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit
object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a
reversible operation.